Sinatra is a relatively new DSL written in Ruby for creating web applications. I only recently started working with Sinatra as an alternative to Ruby on Rails for the applications which are smaller and don’t need all the overhead of Rails.
The Sinatra web site has wealth of information on what Sinatra is, including a great wealth of documentation on many aspects of this DSL:
Options and Configuration
Detailed documentation on all of Sinatra’s built-in options and using
set,enable, anddisableto configure them.Testing with Sinatra
Guide to testing Sinatra apps. Includes information on integrating Sinatra’s test helpers with test/unit, RSpec, Bacon, and test/spec.
Writing Extensions
How to add new functionality to Sinatra using the extension APIs.
Generated from Sinatra’s source with RDoc. The Rack API docs should also be consulted.
Also available with an alternate template at http://railsapi.com/sinatra.
Although the site is well put together and includes details which can help an experienced developer create new applications, the basics seem to be addressed a bit thin. A solution is in the works from a couple Sinatra folks, Bryan Woods and Markus Prinz, who are writing the Sinatra Book and doing so with an open audience on GitHub. Up until a few days ago I was unaware of the book until a tweet by Bryan.
The book is obviously a work-in-progress but is a great start, as can be seen in the hyperlinked Table of Contents. I haven’t gone through the book in its entirety but it is looking good and already proved its worth to me. I wanted to point it out to the growing Sinatra fan base.